The bottom-line of the recent 4GW explorations being pushed by TNIO is that fertility becomes an unanswerable weapon under conditions of Cathedral dominion. The analysis needs a little more hardening up, but prognosis will remain elusive because it leads into biopolitical darknesses no one is keen to coldly investigate. Instead, there’s just elevatedshrieking.

Jim returns to NRx systematics, with a piece of stick for all parties.

A discussion of Neocameralism will require at least passing attention to classical cameralism. This is a thoughtful overview. (Rothbard didn’t like it, but his interpretative template seems to have been limited.)

On the stubborn non-diversity of philosophy. (Those with Confucian sympathies will find the article less than entirely contemptible, despite the troweled-on Cathedralism.)

35 Responses to this entry

Lol, everyone with basic knowledge of history know that the Egyptians were not black at all, same goes for most of northern africa which was mainly populated by people coming from Mesopotamia, who looked much more like Christian Bale than Barack Obama.

Ridley Scott is famous for the historical accurancy of his films, but of course the progs will have none of that.

On a side note have any of these retards seen and actual egyptian wall paintings? Those sure do not depict black people as their kings.

The original Cameralism sure sounds quite retarded to me in almost all of its ideas and I think Moldbug’s Neocameralism is actually quite different, with the name probably being the biggest similarity.

Also, I should start reading Noah Smith’s blog for the lulz. The guy seems to be a giant lolcow.

while i mainly agree about whiteish egyptians i found it hard to definitively confirm this both ethno sides as well as the cathedral have a lot of agit prop and its early crossroads so it probably really wasnt very pure anything as far as i can tell there really was one black pharaoh dynasty and the pictures i have to say dont look very white

Don’t these critics realize that race is a social construct? Christian Bale is no more “white” than Obama. In any case, I can’t see any substantive difference between them–aside from superficial qualities like hair type, facial features, color of skin. And anyways, the concept of race didn’t exist in the ancient world; why should we perpetuate such destructive stereotypes in our depictions thereof? The people who claim that Bale or Weaver can’t be ancient Egyptians are just as bad as the people who claim that Santa Claus can’t be black. Is this not the very definition of racism?

The original Cameralism seems to have been an attempt (conducted with Teutonic efficiency) to formalize the self-interest of the state. This doesn’t strike me as an obviously contemptible project. Liberal Public Choice approaches dissolve the object, while libertarian ‘stationary bandit’ models under-specifiy it. Dismissing populist fantasies that the State ‘represents’ the people, what does is it actually want — when rigorously elaborated? That seems to be the question the Cameralists were asking. (And their intermediate answer: “Whatever it wants, it’s going to want to fund.”)

“fertility becomes an unanswerable weapon under conditions of Cathedral dominion”
Well, Lind has raised that, but it was not an area I was going to explore yet. Still fascinated with the loss of monopoly of violence of the state. But seeing as you have taken it there, we can raise the EU’s right to a family life – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/war-criminal-charles-taylor-legal-bid-rights-family-life-liberia, and the general horror show that is positive rights. Then we can move onto the inability of any Cathedral country to get rid of “vibrant” communities, but instead supply them access to fertility treatment, welfare, child care, and environment in which criminality results in higher birth rates. Then we could look at Muslims who advocate increased birth rates to outbreed people (sure the Palestinians advocate this, and a recall UK Muslims as well, also vaguely remember a Muslim brotherhood policy book along those lines?). Then of course you have Boko Harem and girls education ( I remember Jim covering this).
Society is weaponised against the state.

I think it’s important to distinguish between can’t and won’t. We can only say with certainty that the Cathedral isn’t stopping it, but we don’t know if it’s because of lack of ability (oh wait there’s weaponized viruses (viruses that target groups narrower than species isn’t exactly science fiction) and chemical warfare so the ability to confront it is there), lack of will or that they want it like this. When push comes to shove, things will get interesting. The true believers in the Cathedral won’t do anything. There is the social constraints on the state, that is it’s true weakness, it translates into lack of will. It’s not that the state can’t but that it won’t. Which means that conditions may change. Demographics as a weapon, so it’s ultimately as strong as the ability to keep people alive, sounds as easy to destroy as a house of cards. Only thing that’s certain is that things will get very ugly.

@ Chris B
Not meaning to rush your 4GW project beyond its natural tempo. Agree that all the items you list belong under this problematic. When people (foreign / domestic distinction becoming ever more irrelevant):
(a) Can’t simply be brutally slaughtered, or even
(b) Deprived of positive political rights
— then making more of them is a strategy without an effective response. When all legitimacy comes from a head count fertility is irreducibly biopolitical.

@ Aeroguy
“Only thing that’s certain is that things will get very ugly.” — Indeed.

These disciplinary boundaries, by and large, are not up for debate. Any graduate student who ignores these basic facts about the discipline runs the risk of professional ostracism and, ultimately, failure.

Revolting and hypocritical. The paranoid obsession with race is simply another kind of this exact thing. “My thede is better than your thede.”

That said, tu quoque is still a fallacy. That the author is guilty doesn’t make his target less guilty. Both thedes are retarded. Respectable philosophy’s blinders are hardly limited to Confucianism.

On the other hand, it seems awfully coincidental that philosophy departments alone were able to defend their thede’s culture at all, unless the attackers were indeed Sophists.

On the gripping hand, it’s deeply ironic that nonwhites are resentful of the only racially tolerant philosophical tradition. You think Confucians would let Arabs into their departments? Absurd. It it precisely because of good Athenianism’s transcendence of race that Sophists were able to diversify other humanity departments. Respectable philosophy remains mainly white and male because nonwhite nonmales are bad at Athenianism; they’re either too conformist or just plain too dumb. Though in latter days it’s also become culturally ossified, possibly in an attempt to resist outside pressure.

Aside: I kind of want to back-define ‘white’ now, as those races whose elites are good at Athenianism.

—

E.g. Confucianism often does lack rigor. That’s why science is western. I’m still curious about where they are rigorous, though. They do have truly alien – thus interesting – ideas about the mind. Unfortunately, western translators are typically much dumber than the authors they’re translating, and the text suffers badly for it. The elites who could do a good job know there’s no status in it.

On the other hand, Confucians seem just as uninterested in proselytizing as respectable philosophers are of translating. I do get tired of having to do all the heavy lifting myself. I’m not going to make a priority of understanding someone who won’t put any work into being understood. (E.g. kantbot.)

—

I also note the impulse to seize rather than Exit. If philosophy is really so hobbled, start your own tradition and compete – you should win.

—

I note that if I didn’t have a name and photo, it would be impossible to verify that the author is at all Asian. His alleged Buddhism and Confucianism is pure informed ability.

The piece is disingenuous because mainstream Anglo-American philosophy rejects anything that isn’t “analytic.” So it’s not just Asian philosophy that is rejected, but Continental philosophy and, in fact, historical sources (except as a source of problems). You won’t have much luck if you want to write your thesis on Derrida or, for that matter, Aristotle or Aquinas (unless you’re writing history). The situation is rather like the one in Economics where mainstream thought is tied to a specific methodology and, if you’re interested in something else, you need to seek out a specific department that’s known for that area. In philosophy, there are Wittgensteinians and Aristotelians and the occasional Anglophone who writes in the Continental tradition, but they’re all heterodox. There are also those who write about Buddhism and Confucianism. You can’t just go to random philosophy department and expect to do whatever you want though. The comment on “precision and rigour” wasn’t derogatory, that’s how analytic philosophy defines itself. Anything that doesn’t have clearly defined problems is rejected, including historical sources. It’s about methodology, not diversity. Crappy methodology, yes, but still…

It’s great news that they reject Derrida. That’s actually why I didn’t double major in philosophy: I thought I would have to deal with him; and by extension, my profs would be the kind of people who don’t know better.

The piece is disingenuous because it’s not white vs. nonwhite, it’s analytic (in demographic terms, Yankee WASPs and some Jews) vs. everyone else, plus tokenism where the analytics (in demographics, Jews and some Yankee WASPs) see fit to include it.

The smug, contemptuous parochialism cuts across disciplines — philosophy in America means analytic philosophy, but the continentals in theology (AUFS) and English and so on do the same exact thing.

This means we can outcompete all those sons of bitches. Their only advantage is status, and when has status ever saved a sham before?

In my experience physics departments are similarly smug, contemptuous, and parochial. Seems to be a university-wide thing. I wonder if that was true of pre-war universities. Or perhaps we have to go back to Ancien Regime? Perhaps it was never better.

William Newman Reply:August 18th, 2014 at 5:26 am

Similarly? Not in my admittedly limited experience of philosophy, and somewhat wider experience of physics. (Two good physics departments seen as an outsider, in studies leading up to a Ph. D. in theoretical chemistry.)

Almost all the formal philosophy that I happen to know is related to philosophy of science, starting with a course I took in the 1980s. From that one unsystematic sample of philosophy, the philosophers look awfully parochial to me.

In the 1970s Popper was still getting tangled up on inference issues related to Occam’s Razor (famously re. evolution by natural selection). From that episode, it seems sadly obvious that he was ignorant of the relevant early-1960s work of mathematicians, statisticians, and information theorists, especially “Kolmogorov complexity” and “Solomonoff induction”. And from everything I’ve seen, it looks as though that’s because the entire academic philosophy community was hermetically sealed off from that work. (Very strangely to my way of thinking. “I wonder whether that radar-guided AA gun knows anything about inference that might be useful when thinking about people infering planetary properties from astronomical observations … nah, I had better not think about that.” Because reasons?)

Indeed, it appears from that article that the entire academic philosophy community may still be ignoring it today. (The article says “substantive revision Tue Feb 5, 2013”.) That’s pretty parochial: there are about a zillion computer-sciencey folk who know the basics of information theory these days, and quite a few who know something about machine learning. And what’s known outside philosophy straightens out important problems for the philosophers. As of the readings I was given in 1980s, the academic philosophers hadn’t figured out how to systematize Occam’s Razor and didn’t seem to want to think about inference with realistic evidence (finite amounts of evidence with nonzero experimental uncertainty, as opposed to 100.000000000% precise measurements far more spherical than any physicist’s cow). Possibly they figured out later, I haven’t kept up, but I doubt it, because it’s not mentioned in the article cited above, or in other articles I surfed into a few years ago. And even if they did figure out their own approach, it would be appropriate to cite back to approaches like Solomonoff induction which were developed decades earlier.

Physicists aren’t perfect, but they still remember Einstein reinventing part of differential geometry (instead of learning that mathematicians had done a lot of the work) ca. 1908, and they use that as a bad example of unintentional parochialism. The example above seems vastly more parochial than that, as though (1) Einstein tried but failed to reinvent differential geometry in 1908, and then (2) in 1948 physicists writing articles about Einstein and general relativity still remained ignorant of differential geometry even though that specialty had exploded in importance and prominence in the intervening four decades.

Also the cosmological universe curvature. Their ‘argument’ is bullshit on several levels.

It’s attitude. Yes, physics is close to Nature’s discipline grinder, which means they get away with less. But they do it every time they can get away with it. Similarly they’re exactly as progressive, that is, anti-science, as they can get away with.

Hypothesis: If the logic of endo-colonialism is sound, then nationalist, white and Christian identity movements, along with the men’s rights movement, will be embraced by the Cathedral once their persecution complexes are sufficiently developed. These movements are marching blindly into the Cathedral’s end game of universal victimhood. Endo-colonialism means that even the privileged (white male) natives of Europe and its cultural off-shoots will eventually be welcomed by the Cathedral as a persecuted Other. I predict the men’s rights movement will be the first to find a home. The narrative is compelling: boys failing in class, women taking over higher education, an epidemic of male virginity, and, look, they’re getting angry! But I don’t see why this can’t happen everywhere. Arguably, it already happened to religion, which has already become an “identity” among others. But what about national identity? Won’t the outcome of the French indentitarian movement just be that you can be French-French as well as, say, Algerian-French (the identitarians have already made the crucial move of saying that national identity is blind to race, it’s more like a choice or feeling)? All they’re awaiting is a less (or more) awkward term that can put these things on a level with one another. (AAA project: invent a less inflammatory alternative to “native” for European-Europeans – perhaps “mononational” or, more fun, “homonational”.)

Personally think the bobbies had the right idea. Cops have no business carrying firearms. If they need them, clear out and send in SWAT or even straight up use the military. “You wanna escalate? Fine motherfucker, let’s escalate like we mean it.” Remember that Moldbug post which mentioned how 8 or 12 armed men constitutes an army? That sounds about right to me. They’re an invasion; react accordingly.

Of course I only mention this to contrast sanity with what presently obtains.

“ANTIGUA, Guatemala — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is visiting Guatemala to perform pro bono eye surgeries, a trip his political advisers are saying is strictly charity work but offers an important platform for the Kentucky Republican at the epicenter of the border crisis.”

“It is an honor for me to be able to use my skills as an ophthalmologist to give back to the community,” Paul told Breitbart News. “I am thrilled to join a team of ophthalmologists in Guatemala to perform life changing and sight-restoring surgeries.”

That “Humans Need Not Apply” video is great. It does, however, overlook one important factor: The COST of all those automated services is going to plunge in step with their automation. The cost of going to the doctor, going to the lawyer, going to college, taking a taxi … all these things could fall 90%.

Goods prices already have been falling for a long time. (It’s a big reason CPI hasn’t moved much despite the rise in gold over the past 12 years.) Now perhaps services prices will follow the same arc downward. The whole developed world could enter a period of deflation. Monetary authorities will feel compelled to print money just to keep prices from imploding.

The question, of course, is what people will actually DO all day. I suspect they will get more and more wired and spend more and more time in virtual reality, perhaps in full body suits on omnidirectional treadmills wandering around imaginary worlds (or orgasmatrons). Physical society won’t need them, so they will create new societies in the virtual world. Just as bowling alleys and bars have emptied out, pretty soon other shared spaces may empty out too.